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parvenu; A person from a humble background who has rapidly gained wealth or an influential social position; a nouveau riche; an upstart, a social climber. Also in extended use. Generally used with the implication that the person concerned is unsuited to the new social position, esp. through lacking the necessary manners or accomplishments.

Character Info; Source work and author: Original Door: DC Comics Character Journal name: parvenu Character Name: Blake Thorne Character Age: 26 Character Played By: Ezra Miller Character History and Personality: [This history section stretches through Blake's life to his entry into doors.] The Thorne family were the sort of people wealthy enough to buy almost anything. When Blake was born, the first son after several daughters, the family hired the best obstetrician money could buy, and arranged for the birth to take place in their home. All the money in the world, though, couldn't save Mary Thorne. Mary had been ailing for some time, and her death in childbirth came as little surprise to those who knew her. Blake was brought into the world premature and underweight. For some time the doctors feared that he would die as well, but he proved too tenacious to let death take him so early. He survived the gauntlet of incubators and feeding tubes to become his father's favorite, only son. Abraham Thorne, was a tycoon in the classic sense of the word. He owned one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, the Thorne Group, and they managed everything from blockbuster movies to news websites, and owned a major television network. He was a man committed to his job, but invested in his family, and when his wife died he never fully recovered. He was still a consummate businessman, but he grew protective of his children, particularly of his young son. Blake's relationship with his father was fraught. They were family, and they loved one another, but his father had...expectations for his son. Blake had two sisters, both older than him and out of the house by the time he reached adolescence. They had gone through private school, but Blake's father insisted he be kept at home, hiring tutors to care for his education. He told his son that it was important he succeed, not simply for himself, but to honor his mother's sacrifice bringing him into the world. The pressure chafed. Blake did well in school, even if academic work wasn't really his thing. He planned on growing up to do all the things he was expected to, but sometimes, breaking the rules was just more interesting. He explored New York, spending as much time as possible on the street and out of the house. His father forgave Blake's misadventures, mostly because he seemed to be growing up well. Blake was thoughtful, good to his sisters, and charming from an early age. By the time he reached middle school, Blake's father reluctantly agreed with his teachers that broader experiences would do him good. He sent Blake away to a prestigious all-boys boarding school, and Blake started to really come into his own. He blitzed through high school, popular and well-liked. College was pre-determined, and at eighteen he moved directly to an Ivy league school to study business. Everything was going according to plan. In college,Blake developed a reputation for being handsome, charming, and blunt almost to a fault. He made the best friends of his life there. His friend group became infamous with the students for always throwing the best parties, always getting the best girls to show up, always getting a stripper or a minor celebrity or some A grade weed. They went places and did things they shouldn't. Through all of this, though, Blake remained very much aware of his father's expectations, and the person he had been raised to be. Boarding school and college were a safe haven for Blake to test the limits of his sexuality. He found them to be more expansive than would have been preferable for his father. He had two steady boyfriends in high school and slept with a few girls that he came into contact with in between, on vacations and when he got away from the school. Blake didn't go out of his way to hide who he was with. He'd never seen any reason to feel ashamed of his preferences, too brash and too self-assured, even as a teenager, to let someone else make him feel badly about who he was attracted to. Still, he couldn't imagine trying to explain it to his father, and it was some time before Abraham got word of his son's proclivities. Things continued in this way for some time, casual relationships and a few flings, one or two one night stands - and then there was Eric. Blake met him in a literature class during their sophomore year of college. Passionate, well-spoken, and decidedly not out of the closet, Eric's last desire in the world was to entangle himself with someone who was notorious for swinging both ways. Blake's interest in Eric started as gentle jabs and baiting in class debates, but one thing led to another, as such things tend to do. When Eric cut off the hundredth jibe by kissing Blake hard enough to bruise, Blake found, to his surprise, that he'd fallen for the serious kid with the glasses. The pair became inseparable. They argued incessantly and were absolutely crazy about one another. Even Blake's father, who had shut his ears to reports of his son's less than average sexual preferences, met Eric and had to concede that the pair seemed very much in love. The whole thing went much better than Blake ever could have anticipated. Instead of the firestorm he'd expected, his father began regularly inviting Blake to bring Eric home for vacations. Things were still a little stiff - his son being a strongly gay leaning bisexual person had not been part of that list of goals he was expected to hit - but they certainly could have been worse. Finally, Blake could relax. His grades were good, he'd found someone he was starting to think he might want to spend the rest of his life with, and he was well-schooled enough in business to silence any protests about someone with a same-sex partner taking on such a massive enterprise as the Thorne Group. Four years into their relationship, Blake and Eric had comfortably settled into life together, sharing an apartment while Eric applied to grad school and Blake began to work for his father's company. It was a cold morning in December when Blake kissed him goodbye, promising to bring food back for them both so that they could spend the night in. Eric was taking evening classes for his degree. Blake arrived home after work close to seven o clock, and Eric was still out. His class wasn't due to end for an hour, so Blake put the food in the oven and milled about the apartment waiting for him to come home. Nine o' clock rolled around, and Eric still wasn't back. Ten o' clock came and went. Eleven. Blake began to get angry. Eric must have forgotten they were supposed to spend the night together. He left half a dozen voicemail messages, with no response. Midnight came, and Blake's phone rang, registering Eric as the caller. He picked it up, ready to be pissed off, and was stopped short by an unfamiliar voice. Over the next week, Blake followed every instruction from the kidnappers down to a tee. He left them twenty million dollars stolen from his father's offshore accounts. He didn't call the police, and in private he raged and paced and didn't sleep. He felt trapped, unable to do anything. Every time they put Eric on the phone he sounded like he was in pain, but they wouldn't tell him what they were doing to him. When Blake's father discovered the stolen money he called the police, who swiftly traced it to Blake. Blake attempted to hide what was going on, but he didn't know the first thing about masking his communications. By the next day the police had the whole story. Blake was sure that the kidnappers were going to kill Eric if he allowed the police time to move in, so he called and promised another twenty million if they allowed him to deliver it in person and make the exchange himself. He wasn't sure how, but he managed to convince them that the police had traced the money of their own volition, and that this would be their last opportunity to get anything from him before they would be forced to disappear. They gave him an address, and Blake went in carrying a suitcase full of money and a gun in his pocket. They kidnappers were holed up in a warehouse, and as Blake approached the door to the back room he heard a gunshot go off. In the moments following the shot, police and SWAT team members swarmed in through every entrance. They'd figured out what Blake was up to just too late to cut him off from it. The ensuing firefight ended with two of the kidnappers arrested and three dead. Eric, who they found tied to a chair, had been shot in the head. Later they pieced together what had happened from the kidnappers left alive. They had been intending to kill both Blake and Eric and take the money. Eric had been sitting behind the door not ten feet from Blake as the kidnappers watched him approach on a CCTV monitor in the room. Just as Blake came close, Eric jerked his head against the gun that was pressed to it, startling the kidnapper holding into pulling the trigger. The shot startled Blake, Eric's sacrifice giving him just enough warning to stay out of the doorway. In the aftermath of the kidnapping, Blake was left numb and directionless. Not only did no one know how to comfort him, the police began to turn their investigation in his direction. Someone had to have given the kidnappers specific information about Eric's movements, and they began to posit a theory that Blake had him kidnapped himself, hoping to get him killed. And what was the motive? Jealousy. They found the angry voicemail messages and twisted them into evidence that he'd been controlling, maybe even abusive. Blake told them they were liars, and anyone who'd known him and Eric would back up his story. The police said an anonymous source had told them otherwise. Blake was let go after a long night of questioning, but the police assured him he'd be brought back in very soon. In the days after the kidnapping, rumors spread swiftly that Blake was suspect number one, and some of his old friends and relatives began to buy into the theory. The story was widely reported in the press that Blake was one of those being questioned. He was suddenly no longer welcome among people who had claimed to be his closest friends, and the members of his extended family for had been most fond of him. Of course he couldn't have known the real purpose behind the kidnapping, that one of the higher-ups in Thorne had seen the heir apparent on the rise and done what they felt was necessary to stunt his growth. It worked. Blake never suspected it was anything more than a money grab. Sorting through what had happened more carefully, searching for an ulterior motive, that would have meant thinking about it in detail. And that wasn't going to happen. Blake went to the funeral, but let one of Eric's friends deliver the eulogy. He didn't know what to say. He stayed to watch them bury him, then left. He was on a plane to the other side of the country inside a week. He told everyone he wanted a change in scenery, and that he'd be withdrawing from the company, at least for the time being. No one felt they had the right to tell him no, not after what had happened. His father, never a man who knew much about heart to hearts, only managed to ask Blake to see someone when he got where he was going. Someone who could to talk things out with him, help him get his head right again. He'd known loss himself, and while he'd never seen a therapist to work through his grief, he didn't want the his son to always be looking to the past, to the dead, as he had. Blake agreed only with reluctant acquiescence born of guilt. He insisted to his father, and anyone who would listen, that he was fine, just fine. He was fine. Aggressively so. Upon reaching the West Coast, Blake set himself up in a lavish apartment, then arrived on the scene. He was ready to build himself a new reputation. He poured his anger and his grief into the sort of things he'd never indulged in when he was in college because of the expectations riding on him. Before, he hadn't understood the wealthy who spent all their time seeking hedonistic pleasure, refusing to think about anything more serious than their next fuck - now that became his modus operandi. He was still an educated young businessman, even if he'd never reached the level he had been expected to, and he invested his money wisely enough to enable him to spend it as freely as he saw fit. He drank heavily, did whatever interesting drugs were laid out in front of him, and lined his bed with everyone from society darlings to low rent prostitutes. He saw a therapist, and managed to drive the woman nearly to the edge with his refusal to cooperate in his own treatment. He went to whatever bars he wanted to, just as comfortable ensconced in a cracked vinyl booth in the back of a dive as he was in the VIP section of a club behind a velvet rope with someone soft and perfumed curled on his lap. He picked fights in motorcycle bars and broke the nose of a Forbes 500 heir. And so he forgot about being responsible, about meeting expectations, and dove headfirst into the business of forgetting, a world away from home and the love he'd seen buried six feet deep. But it was never as easy as it looked on the surface. And when the voice came, about a year into his stint in Vegas, he just took it as a sign that he'd started really burning out his neurons in earnest. The voice continued, though: when he was sober, when he was wasted, in the rare, rare moments when he was alone. It was sporadic, and curious, but Blake wasn't having it. Then the journal arrived, and brought with it a nasty word - expectations. Blake had lost his taste for expectations by now, and it was nearly three months before he finally gave in and cracked the thing open. At least it offered a brand new kind of distraction. *** [rooms Update] Between Vegas and arriving in Gotham, Blake was sent somewhere. It's visible to outsiders only in the ways it has changed him. He doesn't speak about it. He won't. He thought he knew about things like grief, and what that could do to a person. He thought he knew about the desperation of not knowing what to do, and how to run from it as fast and as hard as he could. He didn't know. He didn't know what running was. He didn't know what desperation meant. The place he lived in was cold, spare, rural, and starving. Months of starving, months of giving a man his name to put on a register in exchange for extra rations, months of trying to help a few people huddled together in the same house as him survive a deadly winter. Then, in the spring, getting his name called when time came for the annual cull. He was younger there. He was young enough. He didn't go into the games with any particular skill in fighting, but he was fast, and he was, as he had found when the skin was peeling from his fingertips in the cold, interested in living. This was news to him, and a fresh and raw survival instinct made him a formidable opponent. Did he win? Did he lose? Did he die? What cut him deepest - seeing the uncaring wealth of the people in the Capitol while he was prepared for likely slaughter, or seeing children die hungry because there was no one in their family to put a name in for more rations? He has coal dust under his fingernails and a hundred stories he will not repeat. But there is a hunted quality to him that wasn't there before, and a fire to not be dead that goes beyond an escape from grief. One morning, he woke on sheets much too soft, in a bed much too comfortable, to a servant bringing him his breakfast. His instinct was to fire every servant in the house, to clear the place out completely. But she talked about her family while she worked, and he realized that the people who worked in the house needed jobs, so he could at least make it worth their while to have them. He gave raises to every member of the household staff, and then set about the business of remembering what to do with comfort, what to do with ease, and what to do with time. Journal/Key: Blake's journal is an attractive black calfskin number, with a white ribbon for marking his place, and a gray pencil for writing with. The key is bright silver, but simple, hand made. External Door items: Blake brings his extensive personal fortune. He brings almost nothing else, except a few small keepsakes, mostly books and letters, all tucked into a neat cardboard box like he was cleaning out a desk instead of his life.